3rd Annual Queer History Month Lecture

Queer Marronage as Survival: Queer life in the embers of the Plantation

Oct. 24, 5 - 7 p.m. | Dr. Ronald Cummings 
Harriet Irving Library | Event space, room 318 | 5 Macaulay Lane

In this lecture I reflect on queer marronage as a central concept and practice in my work. I use this concept to stage a critical conjoining (and fugitive interdisciplinary crossing) of the fields of Black Studies, Queer studies, Maroon studies and Caribbean studies.

Focusing on narratives of queer Jamaican lives in literature, film and the archives, I examine how this term and how these stories allow us to engage subaltern histories of sexual intimacies and queer kinships. I also look at how queer maroon intimacies are forged beyond, and in opposition to, the logics and time-space of the plantation as a regulatory structure of capitalist modernity.

Queer marronage makes possible different forms of kinship and narratives of temporality through strategies of fugitive flight.

Biography

Ronald Cummings (he/him) is Professor of Caribbean Literature and Black Diaspora Studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

His work focuses on questions of gender and sexuality and Black cultural resistance.

Among his published volumes are The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation (co-edited with Nalini Mohabir, 2021), Caribbean Literatures in Transition 1970-2020 (co-edited with Alison Donnell, 2021) and Harriet's Legacies: Race Historical Memory and Futures in Canada (co-edited with Natalee Caple) which won the Book Award for Best Edited Collection from the Canadian Studies Network in 2023.

He is also the editor of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen which was listed among CBC’s Best Canadian Poetry books of 2021

His most recent published volume is The Routledge Handbook of Caribbean Studies (co-edited with Pat Noxolo and Kevon Rhiney, 2025).

Photo credit: Armando Perla